


and all the roads will disappear

by broship_addict, cave_canem



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: M/M, Mary's mentioned so I guess she's her own warning, Post-Canon, Roadtrip, extensive knowledge of the us road system, nothing graphic tho, or so the author would like you to think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 17:44:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15801486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/broship_addict/pseuds/broship_addict, https://archiveofourown.org/users/cave_canem/pseuds/cave_canem
Summary: He made his decision, jumping head first into the idea with the kind of reckless need-laced spontaneity that had driven him to Palmetto in the first place.“I should go back,” Neil said, tracing the road that connected Denver to Arizona and then, farther away, California.Ten years later, Neil's safe from his past, but he won't let himself forget. Soon enough it's just like old times: Neil in a car and the vast stretch of the road straight ahead. Only, Andrew is at his side and Mary is not, and isn't that the root of the problem?





	and all the roads will disappear

**Author's Note:**

> First things first: this was written for the [2018 aftgbigbang](http://aftgbigbang.tumblr.com/) organized and run by defractum. Thank you so much for all the hard work you've put into the event.
> 
> It's always a delight to take part in a big bang, especially since I had the pleasure to work with Meghan ([broship-addict](https://broship-addict.tumblr.com/)), who's just fantastic and deserves a lifetime of thanks and praise for her gorgeous art for the fic. You can find the whole panel [here on tumblr](https://broship-addict.tumblr.com/post/177402525392/my-art-for-jsteneils-lovely-roadtrip-fic-and)! 
> 
> Huge, huge thanks to Scoop ([zombiesolace](http://zombiesolace.tumblr.com/)) as well, who despite still working on her amazing fic, took time to thoroughly beta mine! I wouldn't have managed without you! 
> 
> * * *
> 
> _Years down the road they’ll slowly retrace Neil’s path across the United States, although Neil didn’t think he ever would have the strength for it. They collect his mother’s money, and Neil collects his memories. He’s told Andrew about the places he’s been but here in the cities and towns he can tell Andrew about his mother, about the little idiosyncrasies of each place he’d almost forgotten, about the oddball neighbors around the corner or the dog that always barked at him when he walked past the fence._ ([x](http://korakos.tumblr.com/post/133306889267/if-neil-and-andrew-traveled-for-a-getaway))

Neil’s fourth year playing pro came to a halt with the sound of his broken wrist.

It wasn’t a career-ending injury, but it was late enough in the season that he sat out the rest of the championship. The Bighorns were a solid team, and Neil sitting idle on the bench didn’t hinder them. They were booted from the championship in semi-finals, leaving the way for Houston and San Diego to fight for the cup.

Neil couldn’t bring himself to mind all that much.

Summer meant the end of the Exy season; the hours of freedom he usually spent on the court were now entirely his. That meant no more moping around watching his teammates practice, but it also meant less distractions. Relaxing evenings and lazy mornings with Andrew were usually the flavor of his summers, but this time he felt too jittery to even stop pacing long enough to get into the car.

Andrew found him walking the inner ring around the court, counting his steps and his breaths and the seats. A hundred and ten, eighty-seven, fifty thousand.

He stopped when he heard the heavy door leading to the foyer clanging shut a good twenty-minutes after the others departed. Andrew didn’t walk up to him first: he waited by the door, hands in his pockets. He turned toward Neil, head tilted to the side, considering; the openness of his body rooted Neil in place, his splinted hand resting on the plexiglass.

Andrew tapped the wall as he walked down half the court and the vibrations extended to the tip of Neil’s fingers, buzzing them to life. He focused on the feeling and not the unstable sinking sensation hollowing him inside out.

“Are you done?” Andrew said. He came close enough to touch, but Neil dug his right arm in his own stomach without brushing against Andrew.

“Done with what?”

“Initially, the court. Exy.” Andrew lifted his chin just enough to look up in Neil’s eyes. “Now I’m not so sure I didn’t mean the moodiness.”

Neil made an impatient gesture with his right fingers, reduced in mobility by the splint. He didn’t have words for the hole slowly eating at his mind, and it annoyed him that someone had taken notice before he could analyze and manage it. Of course, Andrew would say, that’s what counselling was for.

“I’m fine,” Neil said.

“Then you won’t mind if we leave here sometime this evening, yes?”

“Give me a minute.”

“You’ve already had all day.”

Andrew wasn’t deterred by the look Neil flicked him, but he started down the inner ring when Neil did, slowly completing his lap of the court. They were silent and in sync, the way too people finely attuned to each other might be when walking a familiar path. For some reason, Neil couldn’t find any comfort in the fact; never had his legs felt so restless. With Andrew as witness, he couldn’t run. Andrew wouldn’t allow it, and his mere presence left Neil more aware of what a disaster in the making he was.

The plexiglass wall was on his left, Andrew on his right. For a moment, Neil was glad that his broken wrist was not to be held down and that he couldn’t hold Andrew’s hand. The thought irritated him before he brushed it aside.

It was irrelevant, whether he could or could not; Andrew could probably smell his conflicted mood ten feet away and would expect him to sort it out before bed. They didn’t have a lot of rules, though they shared habits and routines, but one of the few Neil tried to live by was that bad tempers had no place in their bedroom. Sleep and intimacies were too valuable to be exposed to preventable bad moods.

If it wasn’t the kind of mood to be settled by a pat of Sir’s silky spine and a cup of cocoa, then Neil expected to talk about it sooner than later.

The thing was, he didn’t know. He’d felt flighty and restless for weeks, but he’d assumed the splint around his right wrist had almost everything to do with it. Unable to play and relegated to the sidelines, he’d had ample time to think his whole season over and over, analyzing mistakes and improving the theory of his game in a way that had Andrew snap at him for being too reminiscent of Kevin. They’d rowed for the first time in months, maybe years, and Neil had spent the night on the couch. He’d won Sir in the silent custody battle, uselessly warming his feet on that hot May night. Neil had made his apologies and kept his nerves deep enough that he wasn’t overwhelmed again.

Andrew, who was unrepentant and relentless in his own healing, had probably been keeping a closer eye on Neil than he’d realized. Now he’d come to poke without finesse until the abscess burst. Neil wasn’t ready yet.

They came to the door in silence.

Andrew had slowed on the last few yards. Neil stopped before the door, one hand on the handle, and turned toward Andrew.

“Not tonight,” he said.

Andrew gazed back at him in silence. His eyes spoke the words his mouth didn’t form: _if not now, when?_

Neil wasn’t ready to answer that either.

*

The apartment was calm when they got home. Sir padded silently to the door when she heard them, mewling rhythmically to get their attention.

Andrew stepped neatly over her, while Neil sat down and took some time to regulate his breathing and his thoughts. He counted his fingers then back in several languages, trying to find comfort in the old and tried method, but his inner turmoil was beyond being soothed by a few minutes of mediation.

He didn’t know what it could be appeased by. Neil took a minute to be angry at himself for that fact, then buried it deep and stood up, stepping out of his shoes and shouldering his bag. He had half a mind to leave it in the hall, but it drove Andrew mad that he kept tripping on it, so Neil dropped it in a corner of their bedroom.

Looking around the room from his place by the door, he spent a few minutes waiting to feel foreign and out of place. But everything was familiar, from the book on the nightstand to the rumpled clothes. He knew everything, and could guess at what he didn’t know: that Andrew had taken the dirty clothes to the laundry room, that the flattened crease on the blanket was the proof of Sir’s midday nap. When Neil passed the nightstand on his way out he noticed that it seemed less cluttered than usual. On a hunch, he opened the drawer. The bottle of lube was tucked away at the back.

Neil was sure it’d been still left out on the table this morning from the last time they used it. He counted the days in his head; the number was inexact but high enough to leave Neil uncomfortable with something like misplaced guilt.

It wasn’t so much the state of their sex life as the fact that Neil was slowly but surely spiralling, again.

The drawer banged closed. Neil felt the itch to turn on his heels and speed by the door, down the familiar sidewalk, past the nearby park and its winding paths. He couldn’t, of course, and he touched the splint on his right wrist to remind and ground himself. Taking a minute to gather the full spectrum of his emotions, he buried them deep inside where the whispers could not reach his mind. It was a technique he hadn’t had a use for in years, a survival instinct needed for a life where apathy, exhaustion and anger were not only useless but dangerous. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, and Neil slowly made his way to the living room, trying and failing not to feel like an unskilled tightrope walker.

Sir started screaming bloody murder as soon as she saw him, winding in his legs and rubbing against his shins until he had to choose between stopping or falling. She jumped in his arms when he crouched and made herself at home on his shoulder. Through the fingers knotted in her long hair, Neil could feel the deep vibrations of her purr.

“You’re a menace,” he told her, reaching for the cat food cabinet. She seemed to agree, and to be conciliatory she started the hazardous descent from her perch that included too much clawing at Neil’s shirt for his liking.

By the time Neil filled her bowl and stood up again, Andrew was placing the dirty mugs they’d left on the table that morning into the sink and perusing the fridge for leftovers. Neither of them had broken the silence that stretched between them since the court, and though they were naturally quiet people, Neil couldn’t help but wonder if it was Andrew’s way of respecting Neil’s earlier wish or a passive way to let him know of his discontentment. He threw eggs on the counter a bit too forcefully before slamming the fridge’s door closed. Maybe Neil was closer to an answer than he’d thought.

He busied himself with the dishes while Andrew cracked eggs in a pan and added cheese and vegetables, shaking the pepper mill above it. Andrew had a sweet tooth, but Neil had learned that it extended to a distaste of anything bland. He did most of the cooking and Neil reaped the benefits. It was a good system, as Neil had neither inclination nor skills in cooking, and ate about everything whether he liked it or not.

They started the meal in silence. It lasted a minute or two before Neil nudged Andrew’s knee under the table.

“My appointment is at nine tomorrow,” he said.

“They changed it.”

“Yeah, a spot opened. Can you still drive me there and back?”

Neil answered Andrew’s nod with a brief press against his knee. He ducked his head to hide his smile when he felt Andrew take hold of his ankle and lay it on his lap with a protective hand. Andrew’s warm palm on his ankle and the little circles his thumb rubbed on the skin felt like an olive branch, held into a river, strong enough to drag Neil free of the muddy bank. Neil took it, like he had done time and time again, and refused to let go.

*

The urge to run was strong the next morning when he stepped out into the sun without the compressive weight on his wrist. Andrew snagged his shirt has they rounded the car.

“Don’t think about it,” he said.

“What?”

“Neil.”

“I’ll wait,” Neil promised and Andrew unlocked the door.

Neil did the reeducation exercises his physiotherapist had shown him under Andrew’s watchful gaze. He had three positions to maintain for ten minutes every day, and orders to avoid strenuous movement with his wrist and hand for a few weeks still. Neil’s feet carried him to the apartment, but his mind was already down the road, away through the desert and across the mountains to the coast.

His train of thought hit a wall and broke.

“You’re thinking about it again,” Andrew said behind him. Then: “Your grip.”

Neil turned. Andrew was in the doorway of the balcony, still inside but already brushed golden by the morning light. Summer was Andrew’s favorite season, warmth suiting him like a cat, slow and lazy in the sunlight. He had two mugs in his hand steaming with the expensive coffee Matt had sent them at Christmas. Neil looked down and relaxed his grip on the railing, stretching his fingers. He bit down a hiss at the spike of pain in his right hand.

“It’s been less than two hours,” Andrew said, unimpressed.

“I’ll be careful.”

They sipped their coffee in the mid-morning sun, taking advantage of the lack of vis-à-vis to watch the people crossing the sidewalk and the children in the park across the street.

“A red ball,” Neil called, squinting at the playground.

“Spotted,” Andrew said after a beat. “Next to the pond.”

“It’s gonna end up in the water.”

“I’m not taking that.”

One of the children kicked the ball too far to the left; the ducks swimming leisurely in the shade flew away in a burst of feathers when the projectile landed in the middle of the water. Neil clicked his mug on Andrew’s in acknowledgement of being right.

“College students studying for finals,” Andrew said.

Neil scanned the park. It wasn’t particularly rare to see students taking their homework outside in Denver’s public parks, but most didn’t come out before noon on a Saturday.

“There.” Neil pointed to a group of girls seated in the middle of the grass. None were studying exactly, but Neil could see the colorful covers of their books strewn around them. “Under the big willow, on the blanket.”

“Clearly high schoolers,” Andrew dismissed.

“No they’re not. But fine, I’ll find you some college students. If,” he added, “you go and have your sight tested.”

Andrew poked him in the ribs.

“I’m just saying.” Neil sidestepped another finger. “Your miss against Robertson last week—”

“Outside the coffeeshop,” Andrew said louder. “Two to none. I win.”

Neil conceded with grace, tipping his head back to the sun. The summer heat wasn’t here in full yet, and he could stand the beat of the sun on his burned skin without too much discomfort.

Andrew’s fingers dipped under his tee-shirt, lingering briefly on the small of his back, and Neil shivered from head to toe. He inclined his head in Andrew’s direction, eyes still closed, just to hear him step back inside the living room. There was the sound of the sliding door pulled open, a quiet sound from Andrew to Sir, and the brush of fine hairs against Neil’s bare calf.

“Hello,” Neil said in answer to Sir’s meows.

He crouched to pet her, running his hand over the length of her arching back and cupping her tail briefly before going back. It had taken Sir a long time to start purring after they rescued her from the streets but now that she had adapted to them she frequently produced sounds as loud as the revving of an engine. She’d just dropped on her back, content to hold Neil’s hand close to her with her paws, when Andrew stepped back outside with two tall glasses of lemonade. Andrew’s had a spoon, and he twirled it energetically until the little specks of sugar at the bottom had dissolved. He settled on the ground next to Neil and handed him what he was carrying under the arm.

It was a map the country, an old-fashioned folding one like Neil and his mother had kept with them in the footwell of their car. Neil took it, gently spreading it in front of him and smoothing the creases.

For the past five summers, they’d done this. They recorded the places they’d visited on the map with black crosses and red lines. Neil chose the road, the destination; Andrew drove for the most part and paid for good hotels, refusing to settle for the cheap motels that Neil had grown up in.

Neil eyed the spots of green and brown indicating the reliefs, traced the irregular lines of the roads, the barely-there blue color of states borders.

He’d grown complacent, standing still long enough that he’d had time to build traditions. The thought, quick like familiarity, crossed his mind: what would his mother say, seeing him like this? He’d survived, but he’d done so going against every one of the rules she’d died for.

He made his decision, jumping head first into the idea with the kind of reckless need-laced spontaneity that had driven him to Palmetto in the first place.

“I should go back,” Neil said, tracing the road that connected Denver to Arizona and then, farther away, California.

Andrew said nothing, growing still.

“We didn’t travel much in America. I was sixteen when we came back. Drove from Canada,” he said, tapping twice on the north-eastern corner of the map. “There was Albany, Cleveland—I think that’s when we crossed paths with associates of my father.” His gaze tore across the country, following the northern states. He hesitated in Wyoming, then kept on going until he hit the coast. “They caught up with us in Seattle.”

And the rest was history. Or rather, publicly available on his Wikipedia page.

Andrew said nothing still, worrying the straw in his glass between his teeth.

“And you want to go back why?” he asked finally.

“My mother had safe places,” Neil said. “People she could trust, hiding places no one can find. She hid money and papers.”

“Your salary not high enough?” Andrew said, because even with eighty percents of his earnings going to the mafia, Neil made more money than he really needed.

Neil shot him a look. “I need to do this.”

“Will it make you stop looking like a twitchy rabbit?”

Neil thought about it. Would it? Would it close the door open in his mind, or throw it even wider? Was there even such a door? Neil’s footing had been tugged away from under him without his noticing, but not knowing why was weighing him down until he was sure he’d drown before the summer was up.

“I have to try,” Neil said, and it was a proof of his deeply rooted care that Andrew didn’t say anything about his phrasing.

“We’re going in a few days,” Andrew said. “I don’t want you driving until your wrist gets stronger.”

Neil looked up, heart catching in his throat. He had known, intellectually, that Andrew would come with him: they were partners, in every meaning of the word, sharing a life.

“Thank you,” he said.

There was nothing to say, but for the first time in several days, Andrew leaned in and placed a gentle kiss on Neil’s mouth.

* * *

_Day 1_

 

The sky was barely brightening up after a rosy sunrise when Neil zipped closed the last of their bags. Almost everything had been loaded in the car already by Andrew while Neil closed off the apartment for several weeks. He stood in the middle of the room, making a quick mental inventory. Packing had always been his forte, but he’d also never had quite as many possessions. There was the knowledge that they were coming back: their roots were buried there. They wouldn’t leave the apartment like an empty shell, as Neil and his mother used to do.

Andrew appeared in the doorway, car keys hooked around his middle fingers, Sir’s pet carrier in his arms. He looked slightly ruffled to Neil’s trained eye. If there was one thing about cat care that Neil had learned in the months of having one, it was that they did not like being put in transport crates.

“Ready?” Neil asked. His smile was too wide: Andrew threw him a look and turned on his heels.

“Waiting on you.”

Andrew traded the pet carrier for the bag hanging from Neil’s shoulder as soon as the front door was closed. He understood why: most of Sir’s volume was hair, but she’d put on weight since they’d taken her in.

“I hope Carla doesn’t feed her too much,” he told Andrew.

“She can starve for all I care.”

Neil rolled his eyes. He rested his head against the window, counting the turns and guiding Andrew from memory. The buildings got lower and sparser until they were well into the suburbs. Nice suburbs, though: a place where an Exy player worth a million dollars could live comfortably.

Andrew didn’t cut the engine off when he pulled in front of Carla Molina’s house; he didn’t come to the door with Neil but helped him get the bag and the crate.

“I’ll be right back.”

Andrew shook out a cigarette and waved it at Neil in answer, his way of telling him to take his time.

Carla opened the door almost immediately after Neil rang, clad in her jogging apparel. She took Sir from Neil easily, nodding as he recited the speech he’d prepared about what he guessed was proper pet care.

“Hello you,” she said, crouching at Sir’s level. “I’ll send you pictures. Go on, go back to your man.”

“He’s not my man,” Neil said, the familiar protest almost meaningless by now. Carla was smiling that knowing grin she liked to give Neil whenever either of them acted in a way that suddenly reminded people they were together, when they were usually all too happy to forget about it.

She’d taken Sir out of the kennel and was holding her against her chest by the time Neil walked back to the car, waving at her over the roof. Andrew was still half-leaning against the wheel, head turned away from Neil. Ostensibly, he was blowing smoke from the open window, but Neil was pretty sure he knew what Andrew’s eyes were fixed on.

They were on the road a few minutes later, crossing the city until the road slipped free of the buildings and crossed the low mountains.

Neil’s mind was peacefully blank. He watched the cars slowly scrawl by the windows toward the city, and the landscape flowing by on his right, not registering any of it. By the time they left behind morning traffic in and out of the city, he was numb enough to fall asleep. He glanced at Andrew, making sure he exhibited no signs of tiredness himself, and satisfied with Andrew’s loose hold of the wheel, he closed his eyes.

Sleep came quickly: between his teenage habits and the numerous travels his job required, Neil had long acquired the ability to sleep anywhere, any time. The familiar interior of the Maserati, with its creaky leather seats and the faint smell of deodorant, was just as safe as his bed.

*

Neil woke up later at the first toll they went through, confused and still feeling out of sorts after sleeping in the car. The sound of the road under the decelerating wheels pulled him out of his dreamless nap almost as effectively as an alarm clock. For a brief moment, he was back on the road with his mother in the driver’s seat, taut and silent like twin puppets fighting for independence.

Loosely gripping the gear shift wasn’t his mother’s hand, wiry and long-fingered, but Andrew’s callused fingers, with their short nails Neil had often felt in his hair.

“Wallet,” Andrew said as he followed the red sedan in front of them into a line.

Neil blinked sleep out of his eyes lazily, bending backwards to catch Andrew’s jacket on the backseat and the thick wallet he kept inside.

Andrew was an agile driver, but he was ultimately too short and the car too low for him to reach the panel comfortably, even bringing the car close. Neil watched him slip halfway out of the car and bit back a smile. Mary had done this too, despite her wariness of still cars and the lack of exits; she was always lightening quick and hyper-alert of all the vehicles speeding past them. Later, when Neil could take the wheel on such frequented roads in broad daylight, he’d done the same, his body coiled up on itself in one big knot.

He hadn’t fully realized how much he’d loosened the twists inside him before, but sitting here watching Andrew flip off the driver blasting his horn behind them, he felt close to understanding. It came in a flash, like standing on top of a cliff and taking the last step before careening into the abyss.

Neil watched the land slip by the window as Andrew sped down the road, almost deserted despite the season. When they left Colorado behind them, a big sign marking the oddly even state border, he stretched and turned to Andrew.

“Pull over,” he said, nodding toward the sign advertising for a rest stop. “You need to take a break. And maybe coffee.”

“Do your stretching,” was Andrew’s sole response.

The turn signal clicked to life and he began the dangerous, yet legal, shift from the far left lane. Andrew drove like he did most things: bluntly and on the edge, forcing others to take notice of him. It had almost had Neil gripping the door handle several times, but they’d never been even close to getting into a car accident, and Neil could personally attest for Andrew’s reflexes.

Neil went inside to get them drinks while Andrew smoked the second half of his earlier stick, walking in places in the shaded eating area. This early on a weekday morning, there were few cars out, and no noisy families.The loud ring of the overhead bell disturbed the buzzing silence of the store; the cashier didn’t bother to sit up from her lounging position behind the till. The view of the deserted aisles sat heavy in Neil’s stomach: the door was close to the counter, and he could feel the cashier’s stare, prickling his neck and following the bizarre pattern of ruined skin on his arms and face.

Neil’s feet lead him to the refrigerated area mechanically and he spent a long time staring at himself in the glass. Most of the times, he got over the stares—he rarely exposed his skin to strangers, and worked in close enough quarters with his team that the questions and unease had mostly disappeared. The media in the Exy world did the rest.

Sometimes, though, he stepped outside to face stares and widened eyes, and he was reminded of the bubble he lived in. It was a large bubble, expendable and only partly waterproof: just enough to forget it existed.

It hadn’t bothered him for some time, maybe because he spent winter wearing sleeves and layers and most of spring with a splint on his wrist. But his skin was crawling for armbands, his hands searching to pull down sleeves he did not have.

He picked drinks and turned away, letting the fridge’s door close with a soft noise.

The cashier was pretending not to look, but Neil guessed he’d been the most interesting thing to walk through the door since she’d started her shift. At least his scars looked old enough now that people refrained from asking outright. They had a sense that the question was distasteful, but curiosity and the need to revel in their own safety often made them ask anyway.

That was what the armbands were there for.

The little crooked display in front of him pulled him out of his thoughts, and he reached for a bottle of sunscreen before he could overthink it. He was pretty sure he’d forgotten to pack some, and the heat would make his scars pull soon enough. The skin was already dry and stiff like old leather.

Maybe Allison was right, and he needed to moisturize more. Or at all.

He pulled out his phone on the way back to the car, scrolling down the Foxes’ group chat for the drama he’d missed. There were updates from Nicky about his and Erik’s vacation to Italy, short answers from Aaron in the middle of the night, Allison’s wit and scathing remarks early in the morning. It was still going: as he reached the bottom of the thread, a new message blinked on from Matt.

His thumb hovered over the keyboard. He kept looking at Erik’s and Nicky’s face smushed together and the Tuscan countryside in the background. Neil usually let the former Foxes in Andrew’s and his road trips by keeping a steady flow of pictures, much to Dan’s delight. The idea to start documenting this trip, however, felt wrong somehow. He hadn’t realized how illicit the moment felt; he’d spent the last few days of preparation hunched over like he was ducking for a blow that would not come.

It didn’t feel right to let the Foxes be a part of what he could only think of as a regression: they didn’t deserve it, after everything.

Andrew was smoking the last of his cigarette to ashes, lying on a bench, face turned to the sky. He pulled up his legs when Neil approached so he could sit. Neil chose to remain standing, taking out sweating bottles from his plastic bag.

“Drink?”

Andrew chose the most sugary of the two, swivelling upside to take a long sip. Neil watched his throat work and thought of what to say next. It was real now that they were here, on the road, already in Arizona.

Being on the road used to be Neil’s routine, the color of asphalt as familiar as that of his eyes. It was almost disappointing.

“Can we go?” he said, eager to leave the ratty stop rest and its sunburned grass. “I’ll drive.”

“No,” Andrew said.

“The store has restrooms.”

“You’re not driving,” Andrew clarified.

Neil made a cutting gesture. “My wrist is fine.”

“Everything is always fine until the world’s on fire,” Andrew said, extinguishing his cigarette butt. “Tomorrow.”

“Andrew.”

“Neil.”

Neil knew when to pick his fights: he relinquished with a sigh and turned back towards the car. Andrew followed a few moments later, as if he’d wanted to give him so space.

*

The hotel they stayed in that night was neither the most luxurious either of them had known nor the worst bug-ridden hole-in-the-wall Mary had dragged Neil through for most of his childhood. Neil didn’t pay the room attention for more than two seconds; he noted the only bed in the middle of the room, dumped his bag onto it and slipped away to the bathroom. He heard the main door close behind Andrew with a soft click.

He stripped down quickly and started on the water until it warmed. It was a mistake. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, the redness of the burned skin, the pale blue of his eyes and the dark bags under his eyes. He couldn’t draw his eyes away, strangely fascinated by the repulsion he felt looking at his reflexion.

The older he grew, the more he could find his father in himself. _No_ , he corrected himself, he found his father in his features. This was something Bee had tried talking to him about on the rare occasion Neil had allowed the conversation to take a deeper and more personal turn: he might look like his father, but he wasn’t him.

He knew this. He believed it. His father had never been capable of love and selflessness, and the Foxes had taught Neil both. His body was adorned with the painful evidence of it. He wasn’t his father, and he hadn’t worried about turning into him for a long time.

Still, the reminder was unpleasant and disquieting.

He turned away after a while, pausing long enough to throw a towel on the mirror before stepping under the warm water. It felt heavenly against his hot skin, relaxing his muscles and the kinks in his body from sitting so long in the car.

They’d accomplished a good portion of the road that day. Neither of them had wanted to draw this shaky beginning more than was necessary, and they’d driven to the hotel, three hours away from Millport, in one go. It was more than ten hours, and Andrew had not let Neil touch the wheel once. He was pretty sure exhaustion was the cause of Andrew’s silence in the last hours of the trip.

Andrew was sprawled on the bed by the time he stepped out of the bathroom, fidgeting with an unlit cigarette he wasn’t allowed to light inside. He spared Neil a look—an assessing glance that had Neil frowning—and stepped neatly around him when Neil stopped just before the door.

“Andrew,” Neil called.

Andrew stopped and turned his head. Neil felt his assurance leave him like air out of an open balloon.

“Nevermind,” he said. “Let me drive tomorrow, yes?”

It was a proof of Andrew’s exhaustion that he nodded without making things difficult. It was something: a small victory. Neil flopped down on the bed and traced imaginary shapes on the ceiling with his mind.

They ate dinner at a small diner just outside the hotel. There was an old Exy game playing on the TV above the counter and Neil focused on it more intensely than it deserved. Andrew took one look at the room’s layout and moved his chair to turn his back to the TV. He said nothing all meal, but his hand brushed Neil’s when they stepped outside.

It was the same question, over and over, for Neil to answer as he saw fit.

Neil gave himself half a step to choose one, and stuck to it as they walked down the quiet road to the hotel, slowly swinging their linked hands between them.

The room was cool when they got back, despite the heat settling for the night. Andrew went to the window, choosing to sit and stare out rather than smoke because of the screen that wasn’t theirs to pop out. Neil didn’t know how he could stand to stay unmoving for so long, lost in his own mind. His skin was buzzing with unspent energy.

He thought regretfully about the Exy racquets and the court he had left behind at home.

He puttered around the room for a moment, aimlessly opening and closing the bags, packing and unpacking his overnight clothes.

He stepped into the bathroom with the thought of brushing his teeth in preparation for the night, but the towel still hanging from the mirror made him stop on the threshold. It had been moved to cover it entirely, and hooked more securely. Neil turned back into the bedroom and put down his toiletry bag on the first plane surface he found.

He spent a minute counting to ten in his five languages, clenching and unclenching his fists, feeling Andrew’s eyes on him.

“I’m fine,” he said, meaning _I’m in control_.

“Are you, now.”

Neil exhaled one last time. “Yes.”

Andrew didn’t believe him. He tapped his fingers to the window sill a few times and said, “The hotel has a pool.”

“Are you coming?”

“No.”

Despite the dismissal, Andrew’s eyes followed Neil around the room as he gathered a towel and his key card. Neil glanced over his shoulder as he closed the door behind him, finding and holding Andrew’s heavy stare. He didn’t find what he was looking for. He didn’t know what he was looking for.

Swimming was a skill Neil had developed early, though it didn’t hold any happy memories until he joined the Foxes. But maybe that wasn’t specific to swimming as much as to most aspects of his life.

In a stroke of luck, the pool was empty, glistening in the growing dark and surrounded by white chairs. He did two lengths before allowing himself a pause to think, floating on his back. Swimming wasn’t relaxing like the striking crash of an Exy ball richeting off the walls, or the calming exhaustion in his arms after late night practices. It did the trick of using all the pent-up energy that had been eating at him since they left Denver, though, and the closed space was reassuring in a way an open road would not be at the moment. He reached the end of his stroke and turned on himself, propelling himself against the wall for momentum. Water rushed around his ears, muffling the surrounding sounds to a dull rhythm, like a heartbeat taken for granted.

The problem with this trip was that Neil feared himself, when he hadn’t feared anything for a long time.

Neil resurfaced after a while, gasping for air and shoulders burning. The sky was entirely dark now, and the pool felt like a stage or a court, surrounded by blinding white lights.

He felt suspended in the air, caught without a foothold between two jumping stones. He had left but not reached his first destination yet, and nothing around him was sharp enough to be real: the warmth of the sun brushing him in the car, Andrew’s silent support at his sides, the stops to buy candy and soda that turned his lips blue.

His memories of his time on the same roads with his mother were fading away, the icing cold fear thawing under the summer light. It had seemed like a good thing for years, a goal to reach through different living experiences, a game to be played alongside Andrew, but now the cord had been unplugged and the screen had gone dark, leaving Neil in disarray.

* * *

_Day 2_

 

They reached Millport early the next afternoon, coming from the north-east. It wasn’t a road Neil had traveled before: he’d approached Millport from the west and had later left from the south.

It had been almost ten years, but he recognized the houses and the quiet streets immediately. The town sat in the middle of the monotonous desert like a dusty island, full of close-minded people and knowledgeable whispers about their neighbors.

It was exactly how he’d left it.

The high school was closed for summer by now, but Neil knew Coach Hernandez held summer Exy practices, taking advantage of the court before dismantling it for the fall. They drove past it, down Main Street and toward the town’s only diner, slowly enough that Neil could see the closed doors, the weathered steps and the decaying brick bearing the assaults of the sun. The Exy team would be on break for lunch, and come back later in the afternoon, after midday’s high.

Everything was deserted. They pulled up in the diner’s parking lot, attracting stares and whispers because of their looks and the shine of the Maserati. All were foreign to the town. This was the kind of town gossip Neil had relied on for nine months, only to be failed by his own single-mindedness.

The server looked at Neil long and hard when she came with the menus, and later with their food. It was a toss-up whether she recognized Neil from his high-school days or the television, or if she was only put off by his scars. He didn’t let her get too comfortable with her staring, meeting her in the eye.

Andrew looked outside the window, twirling his fork on the table.

“Any sweet memory here?” he asked when the waitress left.

“No. I didn’t socialize much. I stuck to the residential part of town.”

In a small town like Millport, the residential part of town was every part off Main Street. Andrew’s raised eyebrow said this, and Neil shared a smile.

Driving felt like a chore after their greasy meal, so they set off on foot, touring the whole town according to Neil’s memory.

“That’s the house I broke into,” Neils said, pointing to a one-story off-white house. The grass was burned off by the sun and the flower beds much bigger than they’d been ten years ago. “It was being sold at the time.”

“It’s a wonder you kept the lie up for nine months,” Andrew said, and they moved on.

With little to see and even less shade they soon returned to the high school, watching from the other side of the the fence as the teenagers paired off on the court. Their voices carried far in the hot afternoon air, breaking the sluggish quietness of the town.

Neil had thought he was prepared, but all he felt now was the old remnants of fear tugging at his roots. He was less sure than ever of what he’d hoped would happen: would he feel nostalgic? Reassurance? Nothing came to mind. He felt blank and detached, half-convinced another Neil had been the one to walk these streets.

“Did you plan on talking to him?” Andrew asked when Neil turned away.

“What?”

Andrew was looking across the road, but there was only one _him_ Neil could have wanted to talk to. He turned back to the high school in time to see Hernandez leave the court.

Neil hesitated. He hadn’t planned on talking to his former coach, to whom he owed more than he could say. But maybe a confrontation would be for the best, turning a page of the book he was trying to assemble.

“Neil Josten.”

“Coach Hernandez.”

There was a small smile on the corner of the Hernandez’s mouth, a tired tilt of his lips. They looked at each other for a few seconds; Neil averted his eyes first.

Andrew had left. Neil could see him through the glass door of the grocery shop.

“I hoped I might hear from you,” Hernandez said after a while. “Now that you’re back west.”

“We travel a lot,” Neil said, not knowing whether he meant it as an excuse or an explanation. “We’re just passing through today.”

A pause, then:

“I followed your season.”

“Not our best.”

“No,” Hernandez agreed. “How’s your wrist?”

Neil flexed his fingers, rotating his hand. “Fine. It healed well; I won’t have lasting effects.”

“That was a nasty check.”

It had been. An overly powerful push after a winning shot in the two seconds time slot allowed to account for momentum. It was a barely legal move, and had slammed Neil in the bottom corner of the wall, his grip on his racquet twisting his wrist sideways. The Bighorns had won that game with a revenge, incensed from the dirty play, but the victory hadn’t tasted the same to Neil.

“Nice save from Minyard in the thirty-seventh minute,” Hernandez said. There was a question in his tone, an answer in his eyes.

Andrew was coming back followed by a jingle of windchimes, holding two glass bottles of what could only be homemade lemonade.

“Thank you,” Neil said.

Hernandez raised an eyebrow.

“For what you did all those years ago. Contacting Wymack, the video of me playing. I— it saved my life.”

“You saved the Exy team,” Hernandez answered. “I’ve never had more players and better scores. Some even made it to college.”

Neil let the words sink it, surprised. He had never given more than a few seconds’ thoughts to Millport after joining the Foxes: it had seemed useless to rehash the past at first, and too painful afterwards. It was all there in the papers and on the internet for everyone to see. But the same way he owed everything to the Foxes and Wymack, he couldn’t ignore the importance of Coach Hernandez’s actions on his life. PSU might have helped Neil open it, but he’d given Neil a clear shot to the door.

“I’m glad,” he said.

It was true: it had been years since he’d signed the FBI’s papers to make him into a real person, but the fact that he could affect people’s lives and the evidence of it still left him reeling.

Andrew came up to Neil silently, both non intrusive and making all of Neil’s nerve endings irremediably aware of him.

He watched Hernandez watch Andrew, curious. He opened his mouth but Neil slowly shaked his head, effectively preventing the coach to spark a conversation that would immediately make Andrew lose interest. Instead he smiled, then extended his hand.

“Well I won’t keep you off the road longer, and I have a team to get back to.”

Neil spied the entire team gathered around the fence around the field, very obviously following the inaudible exchange. Maybe they were just curious about who their coach had interrupted practice for, or maybe they recognized Neil and Andrew. But they were watching, and that didn’t sit right with Neil.

They said their goodbyes, a little formally maybe, but genuinely. Hernandez clasped Neil on the shoulder one last time and gazed at him for a long time before releasing him, smiling. Neil wondered if he was satisfied to see how far he’d gone; if he was congratulating himself on sending Neil to the Foxes. These were the thank yous Neil wanted to say but couldn’t articulate; he thought he read them on his former mentor’s face, and for a moment that was enough. 

* * *

_Day 4_

 

California didn’t feel real until they reached upstate.

Ten years ago, a recently created Neil Josten had stumbled down this highway. He’d been walking and hitchhiking his way away from the burning remnants of a past chapter of his life. California had felt like one long, dreary trip, shades of black and gray blurring together.

This wasn’t like that.

For one, he was driving half the time, with a goal and control over his journey. For another, he wasn’t alone: Andrew was an unerringly solid presence at his side. It was enough to get him through the state border and the first hundreds of miles up California.

They detoured widely to avoid Los Angeles, still getting caught up in more traffic than they’d met until then, slowly cooking inside the sleek black Maserati.

Mid-afternoon on the fourth day found Neil leaning back in the driver's seat with the grim acceptance that traffic would always jam, however much he worked himself up about it. They weren’t in any hurry: it was nice to be able to relax in their seat and wait it out.

A movement in the periphery of his eyes caught his attention and he turned to see Andrew loosening his seat belt.

“Did you pack your overnight bag in the back?” he asked, and when Neil made a sound of agreement he rose on his knees and slithered his upper body between the seats.

A horn blaring behind them startled Neil out of his staring.

“Stop staring and drive,” Andrew said, slightly muffled.

Traffic was loosening in front of them. Neil detached his eyes and eased the car forward to cover the few yards separating him from the car he was following. He was already speeding down an exit by the time Andrew came back in his seat. Neil saw much more skin than usual when he glanced back at him.

He almost crashed the car.

“What are you wearing?”

“It’s hot,” Andrew said mildly, like he wasn’t lounging in the car wearing only Neil’s sleeping sleeveless top, large and breezy. When he lifted his arms, Neil could see down his stomach.

He had also removed his armbands.

His tan lines were grimly pronounced. It wasn’t the first time he had taken his armbands off in Neil’s presence, but it was always in the safety of their home, often at night, never out in the open.

“I’ll put them back on when we stop,” Andrew said finally when he saw Neil’s eyes on his forearms. “Stop looking so panicked.”

“I’m not panicked,” Neil said automatically.

“Then watch the road.”

Andrew gripped Neil’s chin in his hand and turned it back toward the road. His fingers lingered on Neil’s face and Neil jerked away with more force than he intended.

It didn’t make sense that Neil would be more uncomfortable than Andrew. It said something, the fact that Andrew could slip his armbands off and remain collected as always while Neil was slowly drowning in his own head, his mouth already immersed, unable to call for help.

Andrew sat back in his seat. He was visibly displeased: maybe because he thought Neil’s temper was misplaced, or because Neil had refused touch after Andrew had bypassed permission.

Neil wanted to tell him that his touch was always welcomed, that his own head was fucking Neil over, that this mood would soon be over, that Andrew didn’t have to worry. He didn’t have the words, though, so he stayed silent and let Andrew take the wheel at the next stop.

* * *

_Day 5_

 

The scenery passing by in a blur through the window changed gradually as they made their way upstate, slowly getting greener and greener. Around San Francisco, vineyards started sprouting on the side of the road. It was painfully familiar: Neil had stopped to sleep in such patches of grass, had hitchhiked his way down a road like this one, alone and numb from grief and pain. Maybe even this very road. It was difficult to say exactly: as much as bad memories tended to stick the longest in Neil’s mind, his memory had its defects, and he couldn’t remember the entirety of his trip. The endless wafts coming from the ocean, lying blue and glistening on their left, were not helping.

It was maybe just as well. It meant that he waited until dusk, when they made their way to the Lost Coast. The road suddenly veered inland, leaving off the steep cliffs and the sandy beaches behind. Neil remembered that turn: he’d climbed back up, holding his bag close and relieved of his phone, and followed it back to a busier portion of road.

Neil braked suddenly, skidding into a stop on the gravelly side of the deserted road. There was no one around, on the beach or the road.

He stumbled his way out of the car, clawing at his safety belt. He thought he heard Andrew say his name somewhere behind him, but he couldn’t be sure. Three steps and he was at the low barrier protecting the cars on the road from a sudden drop; a moment later he was knee-deep in wild grass, waddling down towards the beach. He wasn’t sure Andrew would follow. He wasn’t sure it mattered.

He stopped when his feet sinked into damp, uneven sand. The sun was low on the horizon but it was still too early for a sunset; it hovered there, orange and blinding, suspended in-between.

It enraged Neil, for some reason, and he turned away with a wordless cry. He kicked at the ground, dislodging the small pebbles lying under the sand. The ground shifted under his feet; every step dug a shallow hole, soon filled with falling sand, always in motion. It made Neil suffocate.

He was a runner, caught in a place made to hinder his movements.

He advanced to the edge of the water, picking up one of the many offending rocks. Throwing it in the sea did nothing but reminding him of his younger self, standing at this same spot, somewhere in these long secretive stretches of beach, and hurling phones rendered useless in the water.

Except Neil’s aim was better these days, his throws stronger, longer. The pebble sunk into the sea without ricochet, soundless.

He didn’t stop until he was standing in a wide depression of stones rolling slightly against each other by the water. He was panting, ignoring the slight throb of his shoulder. It had been a while since he’d ached from successive throws; his endurance was much better than young Neil’s had been, freshly signed onto the line and thrust up against a laughing Andrew.

“Are you done throwing things?”

Neil didn’t turn. He said, annoyed and unwilling to curb his anger: “Fuck you.”

“No.”

Andrew came up besides him, looking bored as usual. His expressionlessness was a good soundboard for Neil’s anger, usually: his temper hit the wall and dispersed away. Not this time. This time Neil was fighting to keep all parts of himself together; he felt unmoored, floating away piece by piece until he was nothing better than ashes scattered to the winds, a bag of scorched bones, buried deep under damp sand somewhere no one would ever find him.

Warm fingers touching his own brought him back. Andrew intertwined their fingers until Neil dropped the stone he was holding. His fingers felt numb, cold and damp. Neil hadn't noticed.

He held onto Andrew's hand tightly once he got it, and when he was sure that he wouldn't slip away, he let himself fall to his knees.

The tears came easily. Neil repressed them at first, taking deep breaths against the boiling pot of water inside him, full of emotions threatening to overflow. But they slipped away despite his efforts, and there was nothing he could do but try to make as little noise as possible.

Andrew let him. He stayed silent like he always was, because though he didn't understand the need to tip the pot sideways until everything poured out, scrubbing until nothing was left, that didn't mean he didn't recognize it in Neil. Repression was the native tongue of both of them, but foreign languages had always come more easily to Neil.

He blinked back the last of his tears with Andrew’s other hand hot and heavy on his neck, familiar like loneliness hadn’t been in a long time. Andrew tugged him up by the hand.

“The tide is coming up,” was all he said.

Neil let him pull him to his feet and step back from the rising waves.

The sun had set. Neil didn’t know when, didn’t know how long he’d been down staring at the earth and forgetting to register the passage of time. Andrew’s watch, when he glanced, said it was past nine.

“Let’s go back,” he said, turning back towards the road.

The Maserati was still waiting where Neil had left it, but the doors were closed. By the time they climbed up by a small path crawling upwards through the weeds and the rocks that Andrew found on the first try and Neil had completely disregarded while tumbling down, another car was pulled up next to theirs.

The driver was halfway out of her seat, still holding her door.

“Oh,” she said when she saw them emerge from seemingly nowhere. “I’m sorry, I saw the car, I thought I’d help.”

“It’s fine,” Neil said, attempting to sound normal. He thought he succeeded. “We were only, uh—”

There was no easy way to explain that he’d been having a nervous breakdown over his dead mother. The woman didn’t seem to need one anyway: she took one long look at them, said “ _oh_ ,” again, mouth twisting, and left.

Andrew didn’t even wait for her to close her door. He let go of Neil’s hand, unlocked the car with the keys Neil had left in the ignition and slid in the driver’s seat, which Neil relinquished easily.

“What was that?” he asked as Andrew pulled back onto the road.

The ocean disappeared steadily behind the cliff and the trees as the road progressed inland. Neil let it, glad it did.

“The sand was damp,” Andrew said, nodding at Neil’s knees.

It took Neil a while, because it always did, but then he said, “oh,” too, in a different tone.

“Not tonight,” he added.

Andrew’s look said he knew that already. He drove them to a small town almost an hour away. It was dark and lost in the middle of the woody hills but at least there were rooms to lend. Neil picked at the pizza they ordered, mind empty.

He said nothing all evening. Andrew respected his silence with ease coming from habit and personal inclination. They went to bed early but Neil lay on his mattress for hours, listening the the imperceptible sound of Andrew’s breath. They were two people lying awake in the dark, listening to the other exist in their own minds.

It felt like going to sleep while fighting; it felt like slowly building back the barrier that had been torn down, brick by brick, so long ago. Every brush of familiarity was rubbing against Neil’s skin like coarse fabric and Andrew, still, was saying nothing.

* * *

_Day 6_

 

They left California at dawn.

Andrew stepped out of the room first to check out, leaving Neil to organize their bags in silence. He packed the few belongings they’d unpacked the night before, rolled up the towels and checked every drawer and the closet twice in case they missed something. He only found leaflets and a Bible, as was expected.

“I’ll drive,” he offered when they met up at the car.

“No,” Andrew said. He took the keys off Neil’s unresisting hand. “Sleep and think until you’re done with this mood.”

“This isn’t a _mood_ ,” Neil protested, but it wasn’t as strong a protest as it could have been.

Even he could accept that he hadn’t been the easiest person to live with for the past few days.

“Then we’ll talk,” Andrew continued, deaf to Neil’s attempts at bending the truth like always. “Yes?”

Neil thought about it, standing next to the car in the fresh early morning. He knew Andrew was right, as he almost always was when it came to Neil. He’d avoided confronting his feelings and the real reason for organizing this trip for too long.

“Yes,” he said, and let Andrew go around the car to the driver’s door.

*

Neil was familiar with the passenger’s seat. They both had keys to the Maserati, and Neil had driven it countless times, but it was first and foremost Andrew’s car. Neil had no problem relinquishing the wheel. Of the two of them, Andrew was the one who resolved most of his turmoil by driving. Neil preferred the immediate action of running. He’d never considered the car a way of escaping in itself, only the means to an end he could never discern on the run.

It felt different that day as they left California behind them. Andrew was speeding along the empty roads like he was running against the rising sun. Neil opened the window and let the wind and the speed chase his thoughts away.

He understood, he thought, finally.

He turned to Andrew to tell him as much, but he couldn’t say the words when he looked at him, focused on the road. Neil knew every iteration of Andrew’s face like his own—better than his own, really. He watched the little furrows in his brow, his eyes creasing in a squint against the low-strung sun.

“Staring,” he said.

“I know,” Neil replied easily. “I like it.”

This was an old, long-lived conversation; one with a thousand of details, each well-known and familiar like worn leather gloves. Slipping into it was picking up an old routine; the answers were in close reach, bounding toward Neil like balls bouncing off a glass wall.

Andrew said nothing in response, but Neil thought he could feel some tension leave his shoulders. Andrew protested only out of habit, because his tolerances had grown with the years and it still caught him off-guard at times.

Neil waited a beat. “Does it bother you?”

“I’d rather have you staring at me than seeing ghosts,” Andrew said, and bent forward to check no one was coming behind them as he changed lanes.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Neil said rather than focus on the rest of Andrew’s sentence.

Andrew took an exit ramp and drove almost a mile on a different, bigger road before he replied.

“No.”

Neil smiled at that and looked through the windshield.

At the next rest stop they stopped at, Neil let Andrew go into the shop and refilled the gas tank himself. It was still early, barely after rush hour, and the area was deserted except for truckers, whose daily routine Neil was well attuned to. He’d spent years hitchhiking with them and meeting them in rest areas all over the world; that was another little bit of his past he’d considered before.

When the tank was filled, Neil drove to the parking lot in front of the store and waited sitting on one of tables.

It was peaceful, a view from his childhood made happier with time and different circumstances. How many rest stops like this one had Mary dragged him to during their years on the run? He couldn’t fathom a figure: it seemed they were always the same in every country. It didn’t matter now, anyway.

He’d seen it with his own two eyes: this part of his life had gone up in flames years ago, and there wasn’t even a darkened spot on the beach to mark it. The goal of this trip, Neil realized, was maybe to make sure of it, to erase the mirroring stain in himself.

Andrew came back with a bag filled with groceries: drinks, candy, crackers, and in the name of Neil’s preferences, peaches and strawberries that he ate sitting on the table with his feet on the bench.

“Eat your strawberries,” Andrew said when Neil started nibbling on a cracker.

“I’m okay.”

“The car drive will ruin them.”

“I think they’ve endured worse than that,” Neil said, nodding to the trucks lining the parking lot.

“They’re locally grown.”

Andrew nudged the basket closer to him. Neil popped a strawberry in his mouth. They were good: perfectly ripe and sweet from the sun. He took another one, then a third, before he realized he was being watched.

“Yes?” he asked around a fourth strawberry.

“Nothing,” Andrew said. He handed Neil another fruit.

“Are you going to force feed me these strawberries if I don’t eat them?”

“You haven’t been eating properly since we left Arizona.”

“You had an ice cream cone for breakfast,” Neil said.

“Quantity, not quality.” Andrew rolled his eyes and popped a strawberry in his mouth, never looking away. “There. Now eat.”

They finished the basket of strawberries slowly, watching the slow ballet of cars and trucks pull up and out of the rest stop. No one approached.

“We should go,” Neil said, watching the clock on the outside of the shop change to ten AM, but Andrew made a negative noise.

“We made good time,” he said. “And you need to stretch.”

“I can do that in car.”

“I can’t help you in the car.”

Neil’s usual exercises where movements he could do without support, stretching and rotations conceived to bring back his wrist’s flexibility, but he had a whole other set to be done on a flat surface, like a table. He jumped from the bench and started the exercises, counting the seconds in his head before relaxing his pose. Andrew, who knew the sequence of movements from a similar injury earlier in his career and, Neil suspected, his childhood, kept a watchful eye on him.

He came forward for the last exercise, in which Neil needed to bend his wrist forward and backward while applying light pressure. He could do it with his healthy hand, but Andrew batted it away and cradled Neil’s right hand in his.

“Stop,” Neil said when the pressure got uncomfortable, and they waited for a few seconds together.

The feeling of Andrew’s hands on his was comforting as it always was, the touch careful and non-sensual in a way that shouldn’t but still caught Neil at the throat.

It was somehow more intimate than anything they’d done in a long time.

“Focus,” Andrew said.

It had been more than the fifteen seconds required. Neil turned his hand around, relaxing the muscles, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to apologize for that.

Andrew kept his hand in his even after they were done, idly sweeping his thumb back and forth over the calluses on Neil’s palms. He met Neil’s eyes with a look of his own, a wordless conversation that established the answers to questions that had been too muddled between them.

“I’m sorry,” Neil said finally. He looked away for a second then dragged his eyes back on Andrew. “I know I’ve been difficult.”

“Are you back?” Andrew asked instead of agreeing.

“Yeah,” Neil said slowly.

“Good.” Andrew stood up, shuffling even closer to Neil. He grasped Neil’s chin in his hand and tugged his head down by an inch. “Yes?” he asked.

Neil breathed out and bridged the gap between them without having to think about it. Their lips found each other with the ease of familiarity. It sent a spark down Neil’s spine; he’d missed it, and hadn’t even realized.

Everything in Andrew was always running hot; his lips were no different. Neil felt them against his own, supple and guiding. For a second, he wished to deepen the kiss, to open his lips and draw Andrew in, but this wasn’t the place or the moment. After a while he drew back. Andrew followed suite immediately, as he always did.

Neil closed his eyes. He pressed his forehead against Andrew, basking in the bright morning light. It felt like the clock had finally slowed down, stopped ticking in a mad race against his anxious thoughts; Neil exhaled lengthily and mentally set the hands back to zero.

They stayed in this position for a while longer, neither of them willing to let go of the intimacy, a hard-won luxury for them, haunted and never really free of their past.

“I just want to close that chapter of my life,” Neil muttered.

“Then do,” Andrew said, because he had always painted his targets in black and white.

It wasn’t really that easy, but Andrew knew that maybe better than Neil; it didn’t stop him from setting straightforward objectives and refusing to be led astray.

Maybe Neil could finally learn to take his example. After all, there was nothing to be done against the passage of time: he could try, but he would only succeed in wasting it.

* * *

_Day 7_

 

Andrew let Neil drive for the first portion of the road; Neil thought that it might be just to give him the choice of turning east right before Portland, instead of driving north along the interstate. He was there to close the door, not stir the quicksand: there was nothing waiting for them in Seattle except regret and old bitterness.

Neil and Mary had crossed the country through the northern part of Idaho and Washington, but Neil didn’t mind not following their exact steps back. There was nothing waiting for them until Wyoming, and the trip was taking on a new appearance. Driving with open windows down empty roads with Andrew by his side, through the changing scenery, was reminiscent of nothing older than the last few years. They’d gone on countless roadtrips like this one.

By the time they made their way through one of the many protected national forests, Neil has been relegated to the passenger seat again. He spent the time napping and looking outside the window, cradling his wrist, rubbing the scarred skin over and over. The touch, he’d realized, was a good way to help him focus on his thoughts. He’d never thought he’d get something positive about his scars, but brushing his thumb over and over on the raised edges of his skin was now as natural as a habit.

The first time he’d told Andrew this, he’d looked at Neil with a blank expression and unsheathed one of his knives, running his thumb on the edge of the blade.

“Yes,” he’d said, as if Neil had told him about the rotation of the Earth. “Bee could have told you that six months ago.”

The memory made him stop in his thoughts. He asked, before he could think too much about it and decide against it:

“Do you think I need to see a therapist?”

“Yes,” Andrew said. He had the same look as in the memory. He turned on his blinker and changed lanes. “As I’ve been telling you for seven years.”

Neil bit his lip. “I’m not sure how to feel about it.”

“I think this whole trip is a good indication that you need to stop repressing your feelings.”

They’d had the conversation often. It had never reached any natural conclusion: Neil eluded a definitive answer, and Andrew was not one to force one out of Neil through gritted teeth.

“It’s not like you still hang onto your secrets anymore,” he continued.

“It makes sense,” Neil agreed tentatively.

Andrew nodded, prompting him to continue his train of thought aloud.

“I don’t think I’d like to see Santiago too,” Neil said.

The thought of facing the woman Andrew saw himself wasn’t exactly Neil’s idea of a comfortable time. He trusted Andrew’s judgement, and he saw no problem sharing, but he thought he should at least not find the idea of therapy repulsive for it to work.

“You could go with a complete stranger,” Andrew proposed. “Or start by talking to Bee.”

“Through a webcam?” Neil frowned. “That sounds awkward.”

“Therapy is awkward if you let it.”

“Way to convince me.”

“Don’t ask for the truth if you don’t want to hear it.”

“Stop quoting me against myself.”

“Then don’t make winning the argument so easy.”

“This isn’t an argument,” Neil said, faintly, distantly surprised. “Is it?”

“I meant in the rhetorical sense.” Andrew waited a moment, turning over his words. He said, carefully: “You seem to have given it some thought.”

“Well, I’ve had the time.” Neil waved his injured wrist. “I don’t want to sink like that anymore,” he added, voice low over the smooth sound of the road slipping under the Maserati’s wheels.

Andrew’s hand on the gear stick moved until it was facing upwards. Neil intertwined their fingers together and Andrew gave him a quick squeeze before he had to shift gears. He didn’t look at Neil, but he didn’t need to; he made his point clear and Neil sat back with the knowledge that he had Andrew’s support, if nothing else.

* * *

_Day 8_

 

It was almost dusk by the time Neil roused himself of his stupor and said, “Here.”

Andrew braked. He was going fast, as usual, and Neil braced himself against the sudden jerk motion.

“Sorry—turn here.”

Andrew’s face was blank. He glanced at Neil, then at the narrow slip of road disappearing between two slopes of a bush-covered dry plain. They were halfway up the mountains, not at the highest point by far.

A small village, barely inhabited, sleepy and hostile to newcomers. Neil remembered more than he wished.

After more than a mile on the difficult road, full of potholes and gravel brought in from the side of the road to fill them, Neil stopped Andrew again.

They could barely see the first houses, but they were there: gray and green, fading into the the breathtakingly vast stretch of land around them. The sunset had cut out their silhouettes against the sky, but now that night was falling they were only emerging because of the light coming from the windows.

Over the low rumbling of the engine, Neil could almost hear the suspicion he’d learned to live with, that he shared with the inhabitants of small towns Mary and he had favored.

“Take the back road,” he told Andrew.

He didn’t offer an explanation, but Andrew didn’t ask.

The back road was in an almost worse state than the first one; Neil actually wasted a second worrying about the coat of dust on the shiny paint of the Maserati.

The house Mary and Neil had stopped in for a few weeks was still standing. It surprised Neil more than he thought it would: there was no electricity and no running water, but the boards on the windows were still in place. Maybe the town lacked young people bored enough to come and desecrate the place; maybe someone owned the place and took care that it stayed exactly the same, even ten years later.

It was the most logical explanation, though he had no way of ever knowing. Neil, recovering from a near run-in with his father’s men’s cleavers in Cleveland, had been drifting in and out feverish sleep when Mary had first brought their miserable party here. Did she get the address of the safe place from one of her innumerable contacts? Did she choose the most remote location she could find to let them rest before Neil’s wounds got the better of him?

He had no clear answer. This, and the virtually unchanged place, unnerved him more than he could say. Grief was a sharp, quick wound: the shallow cut of a knife point, unavoidable and inconvenient, badly executed enough to leave a scar, were it to ever heal.

He’d made it, and Mary had not: he would never know the answers to his questions, and this trip was the proof that he could not help asking them.

Neil gradually became aware of the silence falling around them. After days spent in the relatively loud limited of a running car, the lack of background noise startled him out of his head.

“Modern place,” Andrew commented.

Neil managed a bitter smile.

“A roof and four walls were a luxury at the time.”

“A wonder you’re so well adapted to life in society.”

Neil opened the door rather than answer the goading. He was smiling. As he closed his eyes against the evening wind in his face, he found himself strangely calm.

He turned toward the house and managed, without much trial, to see it through Andrew’s eyes: a dilapidated place, closer to a cabin than a home, hidden in the middle of nowhere. A miserable place for people running through life outside of society.

All around, the peaceful countryside of Wyoming developed, uncaring of their turmoils. Andrew had parked the car under a large twisted tree; a stone’s throw away, the grass grew tall around a rock formation, the plain slowly morphing into an ascending slope.

Neil didn’t feel like going up to the house; he was content to hop on the hood of the car and let the metal radiate heat through his pants, warming him to the bone.

Andrew came up besides him, slowly rotating the keys to the car around his finger. Its noise drew Neil’s attention: Andrew’s movements were slow and slightly jerky, far from the smooth glide of his cigarette between his fingers when he was thinking. The sight in his memory was so familiar to Neil that he found his fingers twitching on their own accord. He frowned and reached for Andrew’s hand. Andrew conceded to the motion easily, letting the keys dangle from his open fingers.

The wind picked up, the smell of dry grass and warm stone wafting to their noses. Neil inhaled and finally figured out what was bothering him.

“You haven’t smoked in a while.”

The fact that he hadn’t noticed was troubling Neil. This, more than his earlier revelations, convinced him of how steep the slope he’d been gliding down was. Cigarettes were synonymous with Andrew, these days. It was his memory that Neil sought for when he breathed smoke, and the feeling of Andrew’s touch that Neil imagined when the last sparks of his stick burned his fingertips.

“No,” Andrew agreed. His fingers closed around Neil’s until they were holding hands, the keys warming between their palms.

He didn’t offer anything else to get the conversation going, so Neil mulled his answer over for a while and asked: “Why?”

Andrew made a quick gesture with his free hand, encompassing the derelict house and its surroundings. “Didn’t seem worth it.”

Sometimes Neil didn’t need words to converse with Andrew: they were similar enough and so used to one another that they were often on the same wavelength. For two people who liked to keep their emotions close and their words even closer, it was both expected and a comfort. Sometimes, though, Neil thought that Andrew enjoyed being more cryptic than the situation required.

“Worth what?”

Andrew sent him a look: _Don’t play dumb_.

Neil blinked.

“Have you—because of me?”

The question almost didn’t seem to be worth asking. It was glaringly obvious now that Neil cared to look for it. He remembered Andrew, playing with an unlit cigarette in their room, choosing to stay inside rather than step outside; never returning from gas station stores with more than snacks.

Andrew didn’t answer. Neil thought maybe the look got sharper, but he was done playing dumb and ignorant.

“I don’t mind it if you smoke,” he started.

“Your little trip down memory lane made me doubt that,” Andrew said. “You told me once that cigarette smoke reminded you of your mother.”

It was unsubtle and characteristically frank from him.

“It did,” Neil agreed. “When I was nineteen, alone and unable to see further than the next day.”

 _Have we changed that much?_ Andrew didn’t ask. Maybe it was for the best.

“You know,” Neil said measurely, looking at the horizon but still holding Andrew’s hand, “better than anyone, how to make new memories out of old triggers.”

“Is that what it is,” Andrew asked, his voice lacking any and all interrogative inflexion as usual. It didn’t feel like the kind of question that expected an answer, but Neil voiced one all the same.

“Yes.”

As Neil said it, the realization dawned on him: smoking, like the bite of alcohol and the feeling of hands in his hair, was something he’d reclaimed from his past through his life with Andrew. This trip, backward and difficult to waddle through as it was, worked exactly the same way. He wondered how long he’d been blind to his exact motivations, how long he’d expected to last, thinking that he was alone on the journey they’d already traveled, that the door he was trying to close was too heavy even for Andrew and discarding the thought before even putting it to test.

He wondered how long Andrew had known, and how long he was prepared to let Neil run himself ragged before stepping in. Neil remembered the previous day, the gentleness of Andrew’s lips on his for the first time in days. Maybe not for so long, after all.

“Andrew,” Neil said, sitting straighter. He inched closer. Andrew was growing statuesque in the dimming light, blue and gray like stone. “I was fucked up when I arrived at Palmetto, but nowadays—” He tried again: “The cigarettes, the drinking, the touching—it hasn’t been because of her for years. It’s about you.”

He saw Andrew’s jaw clench.

“That’s not much healthier.”

“What happens if you leave?” Neil guessed. “I don’t know. It would hurt. Would you?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t need to worry about it.”

“You’re not that good at keeping the past dead and buried.”

“It’s not the same,” Neil said, sure of himself at last. “With you, it’s about growth.” He smiled. “Who needs Bee, anyway?”

Andrew squeezed his hand, hard. Neil squeezed back and tugged him toward himself, already leaning forward. There was no hesitation before their lips met; one moment they were standing arm to arm, the other they were kissing, deeply and with a spark of something Neil had feared he’d spoiled.

But he had spoiled nothing, said Andrew’s mouth and hands.

As he gently tipped Andrew’s chin up with a finger, opening wider for Andrew’s lips, Neil thought he could finally start to perceive an end to that strange mood of him, a tipping point that justified the trip by giving it a definite ending.

*

Night found them stretching on the hard ground, glass blades poking through their shirts. They’d taken one look at the inside of the house, the cracks in the walls and the layer of grime on the floor, and decided to sleep outside.

The ground still radiated warmth from the sun-filled hours of the day. Neil sighed, closing his eyes to the brightness of the moon. He almost missed Andrew’s low murmur.

“Why this place?”

Neil opened one eye. “We stopped there. Stayed a couple of weeks.”

“It doesn’t look like the kind of place where crimes are conducted.”

“Life on the run isn’t that romantic,” Neil said. “It was just empty and remote. I don’t know how mom found it. I was injured—she had to carry me inside.”

Andrew said nothing. He was listening intently, as he always did when Neil spoke of his past.

Because Neil knew tales of Mary rubbed Andrew wrong, he avoided expanding on the subject.

“It was weird being in the middle of nowhere. We’d spent months in cities before that. Every time an animal stepped on a twig I bolted out of bed.”

“I thought you were injured,” Andrew said, tenacious as ever.

“Yes. Mom had to drive all the way from Cleveland.”

“Where?”

Instead of telling him, Neil rolled his head to his side. Andrew’s eyes were dark and his hair had turned almost silver under the night sky. The expression on his face was disorientingly familiar and foreign in a place taken straight from Neil’s memory.

Neil reached for Andrew’s hand and placed it under his shirt, warm against the skin of his stomach. He could feel Andrew’s fingers twitching on the raised bumps of his scars. The long lacerations running across his gut had been left by slightly dull knives: it hurt more, and it healed less easily. A messy practice.

Neil let go of Andrew’s wrist, but Andrew didn’t lift his hand. It rested where it was, unmoving. Andrew had put his hands on Neil there before, but the moment was charged with another kind of intensity.

“Knives,” Neil said, anticipating the question crowding Andrew’s mind. “Some of them are older—they always liked the idea of gutting me alive.”

Andrew’s hand curled into a fist before forcefully relaxing. Neil rolled on his side, letting Andrew’s palm travel from his stomach to his flank.

“I survived,” he reminded Andrew.

“Obviously.”

“I’m not as torn up as I seem.” In the silence that followed his statement, Neil insisted: “We’re here, aren’t we?”

“Two weeks ago, you were thinking of running away.”

“Not anymore.”

Neil’s tone was assured. Andrew seemed to recognize it: he said nothing but shuffled closer, giving his touch to Neil freely. A reaffirmed promise of trust, from both of them.

*

They rose with the sun.

Under the pale light, the house barely seemed more welcoming. Neither of them wanted to step a foot inside; from a common but unspoken agreement, they ate breakfast sitting on large rocks overlooking the valley, warmed gradually by the rising heat. Neil stuck the last cracker between his teeth, brushed his hands clean and took out his phone. He snapped a few pictures of the landscape, regretting not bringing his camera on the trip. It was an expensive thing, full of potential and complicated settings Neil was still learning to fiddle with. A present from Andrew—maybe the reason he’d chosen to leave it in its protective case at home.

He finally turned toward Andrew, inching away from him.

“Look at me,” he asked.

Andrew ignored Neil. He kept munching on a biscuit, one arm loosely draped over his bent knee. He looked peacefully quiet and a little tired, exactly as if he’d spent a night sleeping under the stars.

Neil snapped the picture. He waited until Andrew was finished with his breakfast to show him the phone.

“Like it?” Neil asked.

Andrew didn’t say anything, but he lingered on the picture for a moment before swiping to see the others. Just as he was passing back the phone to Neil, the screen lit up with an incoming text.

“Carla’s daily update,” Neil said. He opened the picture attached to the text. “Do you think she’s put on weight?”

Andrew leaned in, considering Sir’s content expression.

“It’s your cat,” he said at last, because he liked acting difficult. “I’ll let you carry her up the stairs.”

A very vivid memory of Andrew readily making room for Sir on his lap flashed through Neil’s mind. He said nothing, answering quickly to Carla and pulling up the Foxes’ group chat. He had several dozens of unread messages to sort through; instead, he selected a few pictures and sent them without a caption.

Andrew looked at the screen over Neil’s shoulder. He’d muted the group chat a long time ago: this was his main way of catching up. Nicky was already spamming the thread when he said: “You didn’t send them all.”

Neil followed his eyes. He’d left out the picture he’d snatched of Andrew, golden and rumpled.

“No,” he agreed. “That one’s just for me.”

*

Later, Neil forced himself to walk up to the house. The windows were boarded up, the door barred, but he knew where to look. The storm cellar doors were hidden under an overgrown bush of thorns, but they cleared it easily. They heaved the rusted panels open, peering down at the dark and dusty staircase they uncovered.

“Look,” Neil said drily, “hasn’t changed a bit.”

Andrew went first, using his phone as a flashlight. He slipped once; as Neil grasped Andrew’s elbow to steady him, his mind remembered the sharp grip of his mother’s hand on his arm. One of the steps at the end was crumbling away, tricky and unsteady.

The storm cellar wasn’t used as a storm cellar. The stairs dead-ended in a small room, another flight of steps going back up inside the house. It was a good thing Andrew and Neil were so short: a taller man would have been forced to bend down.

“You said your mother hid papers in all your safehouses,” Andrew said as he watched Neil pace the narrow space.

Neil hummed an answer, tipping his phone up. “I should probably have come and got them earlier,” he said. “They could compromise a lot of people I have no interest in angering.”

He turned around on himself, trying to remember. Neil hadn’t been completely healed when Mary had worked on finding a hide, so she’d done it alone. The days spent in this house blurred all together in Neil’s mind: a collection of painful flashes and feverish naps. Everything had felt sluggish, coated in foreboding urgency. They’d blundered and lost their footing in their routine. That was maybe why the Butcher had been able to catch up with them in person. In retrospect, and with the help of the years, Neil could acknowledge their trip across the country had the bitter taste of tragedy. They’d been doomed the moment they set foot on American soil.

Neil tried to walls first, half-heartedly, because he knew Mary would never be so predictable. He was aware of Andrew watching him, angling his phone to make light for Neil, retreating to let him work. After a while Andrew shifted and sat on one of the steps leading outside, cradling his chin in one of his hands.

In the end, Neil found the hide in a hole dug in the narrow angle between the wall and the floor, behind the other staircase. It was a good place, mainly because most people over the age of twelve wouldn’t be able to fit. He had to wriggle into place himself and slither out on his hands and knees.

Neil could almost feel Andrew’s frown as he tried to brush his hands clean on his jeans. Useless.

It was a small safe, the kind Neil had bought for his dorm at PSU. The lock opened with a four-digit sequence; Neil made good work of it. He’d had the codes memorized for months after his mother died, safely hidden in his binder.

Andrew moved closer when the lock opened with a small click. Neil could see he was intrigued despite himself.

“So you’re not the only one who liked to tuck your little treasures away,” he remarked.

The safe was lined with money. On top of it, more slips of paper, covered in codes and references to find some of Mary’s more difficult contacts. An envelope, propped alone against the side of the safe, was left open.

 _Marseilles 2001_ was written on it.

Neil knew what it contained. Andrew reached for it before Neil could warn him.

He heard the shuffle of paper, the glide of glossy photographs against one another. He put the safe on the ground, carefully, and gathered the pictures from Andrew’s grip. Andrew released them easily; it was too dark for Neil to discern his expression exactly but they knew each other too intimately for Andrew to react badly in surprise or Neil to need to worry about it.

“Sometimes,” Neil started, looking for the right words, “to save cash, mom did people some favors.”

“You left with five millions dollars,” Andrew reminded him.

“Fake papers are expensive.”

Andrew shrugged. He was perhaps the person who could best understand the weight of Neil’s past life, but sometimes Neil forgot how different his upbringing was to most experiences. Andrew knew gritty violence. The pictures recording the bloody favors Mary had accomplished for diverse crime lords, gun in hand, led to another kind of realisation entirely.

She’d called them references. Neil hadn’t thought twice of it. The biggest indication of change was maybe that now he did.

Needing to leave behind the stuffy and grimy atmosphere of the basement, he grabbed the safe and made his way to the stairs. Looking upward, he could see the light of the day through the opening at the top of the stairs, the trees gently swaying with a light breeze.

Andrew followed him closely. At some point, Neil’s step faltered; he closed his eyes and clutched the safe closer to him, its edges digging in his palms. A warm hand laid on the small of his back, stabilizing him for the few seconds it took him to find his balance. He reached behind, answering the gesture with a brush of his fingers against Andrew’s.

Closing the doors behind them, covering them back with the bushes, took Andrew only a few minutes. Neil waited aside, still holding the safe. He couldn’t bring himself to let go of it. Neither of them mentioned it; they made their way to the car in silence. The wheels skidded on gravel when Andrew stepped on the gas.

They left Wyoming behind.

* * *

_Day 9_

 

They tried to, anyway.

Andrew sped down the roads in his usual aggressive fashion. Soon enough, they passed the sign wishing them well out of Wyoming; the next one welcomed them in Nebraska. The sun was veiled behind a thin cover of clouds, but the safe was warming Neil’s legs where he held it in his lap all the same.

On the second evening away from the house, Andrew stopped suddenly on an empty stretch of asphalt besides a larger road.

It was supposed to be a rest stop, Neil thought, but it looked rather like the kind of place young bored teenagers came at night to shoot empty beer bottles and waste hours of dark away. It was deserted when Andrew pulled in.

“What are we doing?” Neil asked as he joined Andrew by the hood of the car.

“You tell me.” Andrew took out his lighter from a pocket, tapping it against his palm. When he noticed Neil’s gaze, he flicked it on.

The little flame danced in the night, fragile in the wind. Neil reached for the lighter when Andrew held it out for him.

Up close, like always, the warmth of the fire sent an unprompted thrill down his back. He could feel it against his skin, hungry to touch and hurt. Neil capped the lighter, cutting off the flame.

“Would it help?” he asked Andrew, who shrugged.

“What would you do with them?”

Nothing. Neil couldn’t see himself ever needing his mother’s contacts. The money he might keep, if only to give it out—in his pockets it would only rot and fester until it took Neil down with it. As for the pictures, destruction seemed the only logical end for them.

Fire was particularly appropriate, considering what had happened to the woman who’d taken them.

The safe grew heavy in his hands, but Neil nodded, slowly.

“How will we do it?”

“I thought you were the expert in settings things on fire,” Andrew replied, and Neil was so incensed he forgot to be hurt by the words.

“Stop being an asshole,” he said.

Andrew didn’t reply: he knew that already.

Neil put down the safe next to the car and went in the back, looking for the bottle of whisky Andrew had brought from Denver. They hadn’t opened it on the trip. Maybe he’d figured out Neil would need it, whether to drink or to set fire to his past—literally.

Neil found a picnic table across the area and dropped the safe on its dirty concrete surface, quickly rifling through the contents again. He opened the envelope and spread the pictures, to make sure none of them escaped the flames. When he was done, he doused the papers in alcohol, making sure it soaked through the bottom of the pile.

Ink started to bleed instantly, distorting the violent shapes of the photograph, blurring out names and numbers. In the moment Neil took to watch some of the final tangential proofs of his past become indistinct, Andrew caught up with him, walking slowly toward the bin with his hands in his pockets.

He was silent as Neil clicked on the lighter. Neil didn’t mind; he directed most of his focus in making sure his hands were not shaking. In the end the demanded less than he’d thought.

He held up one of the photographs to the flame, letting the corner gently catch fire before clicking the lighter shut. The flames started timidly, then ran across the picture hungrily. The glossy paper whilted between Neil’s fingers, brought down by its own weight. Neil had time to make out the figure of a man, prone on the floor, before the flames engulfed it.

Andrew stepped forward when Neil dropped the picture in the safe. Its metal faces resisted longer to the fire than Neil had thought; only when most of the papers were reduced to ashes did it finally creak and groan, warped around its burning contents. The smell of burned metal assaulted Neil’s nostrils, a choking reminder of the reason they were standing there, lost in the middle of nowhere. For a moment he couldn’t breathe; he choked through the pain and closed his eyes.

The flames extinguished quickly after all of the paper was gone. Thin smoke rose from the pile of ashes, considerably less than would have been impressive.

“Well,” Neil coughed, batting away the smoke that drifted toward him. “That’s done.”

“Is it enough?” Andrew asked.

His tone said he didn’t believe it was. Neil shook his head.

“It’s a start,” he said. “Cleveland next.”

* * *

_Day 11_

 

Cleveland was closer than Neil remembered; traveled while conscious and in a comfortable car, the trip was mostly easy. They spent the night in a motel around Chicago, noticing the first signs of change: the parking lot was full when they arrived and when they left, the roads were more packed. Even the weather changed noticeably: they battled mosquitoes at night and suffered through moist heat during the day.

They reached the city in the middle of the afternoon. The streets were still empty before people left their office jobs. Neil busied himself looking around. The city had changed: it had been years. All the same, he could recognize the urban landscape, if only because it was the same everywhere. Overflowing garbage bins, the patchwork of asphalt on the sidewalk, a group of workers in orange vests grouped around a manhole—looking at them through the windshield of a car, foreign to the city, every one of these sights was familiar. He knew the strange feeling in him, awkward like standing with only one foot on a step, of driving through a city he would have to learn without making his.

They crossed the west side of the city first, unremarkable to Neil, but he started remembering as soon as they came on the east side of the river.

A flash of red—the pizza parlor Mary allowed them to eat in one day, instead of ordering to go. Neil turned around just as Andrew weaved into traffic. No, that wasn’t right; he didn’t recognize anything from the neighborhood, and according to the GPS they were too far west. The storefront disappeared behind a noisy truck.

“Do you need me to stop?” Andrew asked, looking in the rearview mirror like he could see what had held Neil’s interest.

“No, I—I thought I saw something. Wrong neighborhood.”

Andrew gently let the car rest to a stop in the line at a red light. “Do you want to drive?”

Neil hesitated. “I’d rather look outside.”

When the light went green, Andrew accelerated much gentler than usual. He always drove on the wrong side of the speed limit, but whenever Neil looked at the speedometer after that he always saw the red hand hovering over the correct numbers.

They left behind downtown and its high skyline, slowly driving past lowest buildings, three-stories buildings with colorful storefront on the ground floor.

“Oh,” Neil said, surprised, after a one-way circulation forces Andrew to turn into a random street. He sits straighter in his seat. “I know that street. We lived right around the corner—that was our laundromat, the cameras were always broken, we’d hack the machines—”

Andrew raised an eyebrow.

“You need a straw—I’ll show you at home.”

“We don’t have a coin machine at home,” Andrew said pointedly.

Their washer and dryer were situated inside their apartment, a luxury Neil could appreciate as such.

“Alright, then park there.”

Andrew did, with his usual jerky manner. He parked the Maserati neatly in front of the laundromat. Neil made his way to a corner store across the road and came back with the tools he needed.

“Straws,” Andrew said.

“I wasn’t joking.”

The laundromat was empty, luckily. Neil looked around: in a decade, nothing had changed, from the rickety chairs in the corner to the off white walls. The camera was still hanging from the ceiling, its lights dead. Someone had stuck a yellow smiley face sticker on the lense.

Neil chose the closest machine to the door, instinctively turning his back to the room to hide his actions while giving himself an unencumbered view of the street.

“You can use paper clips as well,” Neil said, pulling the tray to reveal the coin slots. “But plastic straws are good because they bend if needed.”

He quickly positioned the straws inside the slots, checked the angle, and wriggled them further inside. The trick was in activating the spot a coin pushed inside the slot would press on.

“Aha,” Neil muttered after a few seconds. They watched as the door of the empty washer clicked shut.

There was a whirring noise as the pipes filled with water; Andrew pressed on the cancel button and everything fell quiet again.

An ambulance raced past them in the street. Neil looked up, his old vigilance coming back like an Exy ball slamming on a wall.

Andrew’s hand brushed his. Neil’s fingers were still holding the straws in place; he relaxed and let go, pulling the tray open again.

“Wanna try?” he asked, stepping aside.

Andrew bunched up Neil’s straws, bent out of shape, and reached for more in the pack Neil had bought.

“Feel for the click,” Neil said. “No, jiggle it gently.”

Andrew wiggled his fingers at him. A demand to keep quiet, maybe, or a demonstration of his fingers’ nimbleness. He was a fast-learner. In under two minutes, he had the machine humming to life again.

“Easy, right?” Neil said.

“Useful trick,” Andrew replied. “I would have used it growing up.”

They made their way back to the car, but Neil hesitated with his hand on the handle.

“Maybe we should walk,” he said.

Andrew locked the car again with a beep. He didn’t say anything as they made their way down the street, keeping pace with Neil who stopped every few feet. It seemed extraordinarily silly, to be assaulted with so many little fragments of memories. The insignifiant facts only acquired meaning with Andrew at Neil’s side, a foil for a life Neil had put behind a long time ago.

He pointed out the store where his mother had once had him steal alcohol, because she was covered in blood, some of it her own. There was the slip of bare earth and spotty grass masquerading as a park; Neil had spent long hours there, trying to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the apartment where Mary was growing more and more nervous with every day spent on American soil.

They crossed the park quickly: there was only one path and four benches. On the other side was a small playground, with a wobbly merry-go-round and a swingset. Despite the hour, the park was deserted.

“I’m surprised she let you out at all,” Andrew remarked as they settled on the swings.

“I went when I knew she’d be gone,” Neil said. “She picked up a contract—dirty work in exchange of papers and a place to stay.”

“And the other party ratted you out at the first opportunity?”

“Mmm.”

There was a pause, then Andrew said, his tone blank: “I thought she took you with her when she worked.”

“Not for this one.” Neil shrugged. “She’d shown me the basics years ago, in Europe. She didn’t want me interfering. Besides,” he added, “my father’s men caught up with us when we were out of the apartment. Staying inside was safer.”

Andrew toed at the ground, swaying gently. He was leaning against the sturdy chain holding the swing to the rail; a familiar pose, almost automatic. Neil didn’t think Andrew had been the kind of child to play with others at the park, but he also knew Andrew had spent most of his childhood hanging around the suburban jungles he’d grown up in.

Figuring out more of Andrew’s past while on this trip inside Neil’s had an appeal he hadn’t realized before. He must have been staring for a long time, because Andrew skidded to a stop with his feet in the dust.

“What,” he asked.

He reached for Neil’s leg with his foot, sending him gently rocking sideways.

“Nothing,” Neil said, smiling and only just registering it. “Just considering how you probably fit under the height limit for the playground.”

Andrew got up, catching the chains of Neil’s swings above Neil’s head.

“What are you—” Neil started to say.

His sentence dissolved in breathy laughter when Andrew twisted the chains, spinning Neil’s swing on itself several times until Neil could feel his feet leave the ground. Andrew let go with a jerk, pushing Neil’s shoulder to give him more momentum. The swing spinned the other way rapidly; Neil’s head tossed around until he thought to duck his chin in his chest. He had barely time to feel nauseous before the swing rocked to a halt.

Andrew grabbed the chains again, preventing it from completing another rotation from its own impetus.

“Was that really necessary?” Neil asked, feet safely back on the ground. He was grinning.

“If you’d had a less dramatically tragic childhood,” Andrew said, with the careful bland tone that betrayed his affection, “it wouldn’t be.”

“You just wanted to shut me up.”

“How did I do?”

“You know there are more efficient ways of doing that.”

“Are there,” Andrew said, looking bored.

The way he was leaning forward above Neil, not relinquishing his hold on the chains of the swing, belied his words. Neil arched upwards and kissed him, hands travelling upwards until they met Andrew’s.

*

Neil made them go back to the car after they left the park, turning his back to the street leading to the rundown building Mary and he had lived for almost two months.

“No papers to pick up?” Andrew asked as Neil settled behind the wheel.

Neil shrugged, backing out of the barely legal parking spot they’d been occupying. “Just money. Probably all gone now.”

“It’s been ten years,” Andrew agreed.

Neil wondered how long he’d wanted to say that.

“Not worth it,” he said, and accelerated out of the ramp into the freeway.

* * *

_Day 12_

 

The road to the Maine coast passed through New York. Neil consciously ignored all and every sign that announced they were approaching Albany; they zipped by the city without looking back.

Andrew glanced once at Neil for an explanation. He probably remembered as well as Neil did that Albany had been on the list Neil had drawn, all these days ago, back in Denver. It seemed so long ago; it seemed to Neil that they had been on the road for a lifetime, though it was only a few days. He’d gone far longer between real stops before.

All of a sudden he missed it more than he could articulate. His fingers curled on the leather-covered wheel of the Maserati, longing for the smoothness of Sir’s fur. He even missed the bedroom, the safety of the too-large bed in the corner.

“Albany,” Andrew said after a while, calling Neil back to the matter at hand.

“We breezed through,” Neil said. “Stayed at a motel, only a few days. Mom didn’t leave anything behind.” This explanation could have sufficed. Because he was talking to Andrew and he wanted to, he added: “We couldn’t reach Mom’s contact for papers. That’s why Cleveland happened.”

Cleveland: now that they’d visited the city, Neil remembered acutely the sequence of events that had left to the destruction of their duo. The mad dash out of Albany, dreading any encounter with the authorities with outdated identities, the favors Mary had to do to get their new papers, the bitter taste of being betrayed, voluntarily or not, to the Butcher’s men. The fire in his gut when the blades made contact with the skin of his stomach.

Then, perfect parallel to the present, Wyoming.

*

Neil cut off the car’s AC as they arrived around Portland. As they branched off to a smaller road, leavin the interstate to keep going on north, Neil opened the windows to let in the air.

The road itself was a historical landmark. It weaved its way through forests, small picturesque villages with antique stores and bed and breakfasts, before coming back to the coast, like magnetically called by the rhythmical sound of the waves.

The ocean flashed blue through the trees, an appeased version of the they had left behind in California.

“Hey,” Neil said as they approached yet another one-street village, “we crossed the country.”

“What a marvel,” Andrew said, but he too had to feel the strain of a twelve-day trip.

“We can get lobster. Isn’t Maine famous for their lobsters?”

Andrew, who claimed to be allergic to all seafood, glared at Neil. The next building they passed was a old-fashioned grocery; in front of the windows were suspended big red iron lobsters, the kind made to be tacked to the wall. Andrew slapped his hand on Neil’s mouth to stifle his laugh, but he couldn’t contain Neil’s grin under his palm and neither could Neil.

*

The town Mary and Neil had stopped in after crossing the border from Canada was nestled in the jagged coast of Maine. They had to leave the US1 for even smaller roads, winding through the countryside. The view cleared of trees: as they drove closer to the town, the vistas unfolded in front of the car like an infinite blue carpet, fringed with small white houses battered by the elements.

They parked the car downtown, unwilling to attract more attention with an expensive sport car that had known better shine days, and strolled the streets, noisy with port sounds and human activity.

This close to the sea, the wind picked up and pierced through their clothing, both of a blessing and a novelty. Before leaving the car, Neil reached for his bag and uneatherd his armbands. For the first time of the trip he felt like he could wear them without suffering from heatstroke.

Matching in black and dishevelled hair, they made their way mindlessly through the city. They didn’t have a goal in particular, no house to visit and reminisce. Mary and Neil had only spent a night in this town, but it was the first step either of them had been in the country.

For Mary it meant nothing if a death sentence; for Neil it meant going back home, even if the thought had filled him with terror at the time. He was probably more sentimental about the fact now than he’d been at the time.

It didn’t matter much; the sun was shining, the wind was picking at the their clothes, and they wandered around town peacefully. Midway through their stroll along the long harbor, Andrew clasped their hands together. The feeling of his skin against his own settled something in Neil that had been agitated for a long time.

They stopped at a small souvenir shop; Andrew stood around looking bored and making the young cashier uncomfortable while Neil rifled through the keyring display. Allison’s birthday was approaching; Neil thought she’d probably like a sentimental gift. If not, he could always order something online when they got home.

He payed for the trinket, avoiding eye-contact with the cashier whose unease was weirdly catching. When he got back to Andrew, he found him, incredibly, looking down at his phone.

“Everything okay?” Neil asked.

“Turn on your phone,” Andrew replied. He sent a short text and locked his phone. “Molina’s been trying to call you. Sir’s sick.”

Neil fished out his phone from his pocket. He had three missed calls and five texts, including one that that said: _I’m calling andrew._

“Is it serious?”

“No, she just ate too much tuna.” Andrew held out his arm, peering inside the bag Neil was holding. “Molina’s never had any siblings or pets, she worries over nothing.”

“Unlike you, who once rushed me to the doctor for a cold.”

“Flu. You were bedridden for a week.”

Neil waved the old argument aside. They strolled along the harbor until they hit the end of the quays. On one side the street disappeared back into town; on the other, a long wooden pier advanced into the sea.

There was an ice cream stand at the start of the pier. There was no reason to choose to head back into town; Neil followed as Andrew slipped his wallet out of his pocket.

Andrew didn’t need time to decide; he glanced at the flavors displayed and bought the most ridiculous, some kind of candy-flavored blue monstrosity.

“Why?” Neil asked.

“Why not?”

It was as good an answer as any. They made their way down the pier. The sky was infinitely blue; seagulls zoomed overhead, calling noisily between themselves. The pier was empty; there were no witness to see Andrew lazily eat his ice cream, the frown appearing between his eyes when some of it dripped on his hand.

“What?” he asked, licking the side of his thumb.

“Nothing,” Neil said, aware he was, once again, staring. “I’m happy we’re here.”

Andrew’s expression shifted. He said nothing, but Neil knew he was aware of how formidable a shift in Neil’s mood this was.

They reached the end of the pier. Andrew finished his cone in two bites, brushed his hands against his pants and sat down, feet dangling over the water. Neil followed suite, leaning forward; under the planks, water frothed white against the jagged edges of the rocks.

It was water; an ocean, salted and blue and too vast for the human mind to grasp fully. Somehow, though, Neil could feel the difference with the Californian coast. It only helped to reinforce how many miles they’d travelled, the distance they’d put between each and everyone of Neil’s bad memories.

He breathed in the salty air, closing his eyes, testing every one of his mental wards. He probed at the baseless claustrophobia and the urge to run, difficult to summon from a vantage point where he could see the sky and the ocean melt together on the horizon. Mary, he thought distantly, like watching someone else come to the realization, was dead and gone—half buried, half dispersed in smoke over water and tall white cliffs. It was stupid to pretend otherwise, and maybe a bit ridiculous that he’d needed to cross the country to realize this, but he was done and he didn’t regret it.

Next to him, Andrew shook his cigarette pack in a wordless question. The lighter rattled against the sticks inside; a noise so common Neil had never thought to question it before. He shook his head no without opening his eyes, but gestured vaguely at Andrew to go on.

A click, the hiss of the first inhale; Neil could see the shape of the flame dancing against his lids.

The smoke wafted to him, carried by the gentle breeze, but when Neil took apart the emotions raised by the smell, everything he could find was Andrew, Andrew, Andrew.

He opened his eyes.

Andrew was watching him, half turned toward him with his knee tucked against his chest. He answered Neil’s gaze on him by waving the cigarette in front of him, dispersing the smoke like Neil liked to do.

Neil took a long breath.

“Finally,” Andrew said.

“Thank you,” Neil answered.

Andrew waved the gratitude aside with a flick of his fingers, but his eyes didn’t leave Neil’s face.

“Tell me,” Neil said, “something about your childhood.”

“Tired of speaking about your own?”

“Yes,” Neil said frankly. “Also, I love knowing about you.”

Andrew poked his cheek. Neil turned his face until the finger rested on his lips, brushing a kiss on the tip.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything, so long it’s about you.”

Andrew was silent for a moment, mulling over the question.

“When I was in second grade,” he said, “I was the tallest kid in my grade.”

Neil bit his lip.

“Stopped growing after that?” he asked.

“Stunted your growth with highway food and too much coffee?” Andrew retorted.

“Probably.” Neil shrugged, nudging Andrew’s knee. “Again.”

Andrew exhaled, a long puff of smoke Neil breathed like needed air.

“When I was six, one of my foster families had a pet turtle.”

“A pet turtle.”

“California,” Andrew replied like it explained everything. “I used to feed it my greens until it bit me.”

Neil threw his head back, laughing soundlessly. He wished briefly that Andrew and he had found each other sooner, escaped some of the hardships they’d had to face with no one at their back. Wishful thinking—and Andrew did not believe in regret. Neil wasn’t sure he was ready to ascribe to such a strict philosophy, but he could see its merits. This trip certainly proved it.

Neil leaned back until he was lying against the sun-warm planks of the pier. The afternoon was coming to an end, but the sky was still the same deep blue. Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see a thin tendril of smoke; Andrew was still smoking leisurely, silent and tranquil like a cat.

In his head, Neil pictured a map of the country. He highlighted the places they’d gone to, marked their current location with a cross, started to plan their journey back. They should go south, for a change in the scenery.

Maybe they could pass through South Carolina, stop in Palmetto, see Wymack. Andrew would like it: they could stop by Bee’s on the way.

Neil stopped on the idea, going back on it until it was fully formed, logistics planned out.

They’d shut the door on the countless boys he’d been before: it was time to visit Neil Josten’s past.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Don't try the coin machine trick at home, kids. It's not worth it.
> 
> 2\. Once again, find the art [on tumblr](https://broship-addict.tumblr.com/post/177402525392/my-art-for-jsteneils-lovely-roadtrip-fic-and). 
> 
> 3\. Thank you all so much for reading this fic. You can find me on tumblr at [jsteneil](http://jsteneil.tumblr.com/post/177403575941/and-all-the-roads-will-disappear)!


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